Abstract

Many studies at home and abroad in recent years have been focusing on college students’ metacognitive strategies use, whereas limited studies on high school students’. This study aims to look into the present situation of the application of metacognitive strategies in high school students’ reading comprehension, and the major factors that influence high school students’ application of these strategies. The primary data are derived from student’s scores in reading comprehension tests, questionnaire and interview. The major findings are summarized as follows:

Firstly, high school students use metacognitive strategies in English reading comprehension at a moderate level in general. Among the four categories, planning and selective attention achieve moderate use, and monitoring and evaluating, achieve high use and low use respectively. Sub-strategies of planning and selective attention achieve inconsistent frequency use.

Secondly, students of high-score group have a more frequent use of metacognitive strategies of all the four categories than those of low-score group. The gap between high-score achievers and low-score achievers in the application of monitoring is comparably large while the difference between the two groups in using the strategy of planning is trivial.

Thirdly, two categories of factors, namely, environmental factors and learner factors have been identified as important influencing factors. With regard to environmental factors, system training of metacognitive strategies can facilitate students’ use of metacognitive strategies, and difficultly of text can have a positive or negative influence by adding to students’ anxiety. As to learner factors, motivation plays an important role. The lack of background knowledge can activate students to increase their use of metacognitive strategies in English reading comprehension.

In light of the above findings, the researcher draws some implications for teachers and students respectively that may be helpful for the improvement of both learning and teaching.

Key words: metacognitive strategies, reading comprehension, high school students